Satya Nadella: prediction

Transcript context

…Just to make sure we’re talking about the same thing, is it a thing that a human like me using Excel… No, it’s completely autonomous. So we should now maybe lay out what I think the future of the company is. The future of the company would be the tools business in which I have a computer, I use Excel. In fact, in the future I’ll even have a Copilot, and that Copilot will also have agents. But it’s still me steering everything, and everything is coming back. That’s one world. The second world is the company just literally provisions a computing resource for an AI agent, and that is working fully autonomously. That fully autonomous agent will have essentially an embodied set of those same tools that are available to it. So this AI tool that comes in also has not just a raw computer, because it’s going to be more token-efficient to use tools to get stuff done. In fact, I kind of look at it and say that our business, which today is an end-user tools business, will become essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work. It’s another way to think about it. In fact, all the stuff we built underneath M365 still is going to be very relevant. You need some place to store it, some place to do archival, some place to do discovery, some place to manage all of these activities, even if you’re an AI agent. It’s a new infrastructure. To make sure I understand, you’re saying theoretically a future AI that has actual computer use—which all these model companies are working on right now—could use, even if it’s not partnered with Microsoft or under our umbrella, Microsoft software. But you’re saying, if you’re working with our infrastructure, we’re going to give them lower-level access that makes it more efficient for you to do the same things you could have otherwise done anyways?…

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